The Acid party. Eddie and his girlfriend, Rich and his girl:
We had one wild party at this cottage. I spent a half of my Christmas money on some liquid L.S.D., (such were my priorities). There were to be about twenty guests so I mixed twenty strong hits into a large pitcher of Cool-Aid, labelled it ‘ACID’ and placed a stack of paper Dixie cups with instructions beside it. They were small because the mixture was strong. It worked out to about four ounces a hit. All this was set up on the kitchen counter before the party started.
Bones and May were there with a bunch of friends, so we had live music. The boys from the front house, my high school friends from across the bay, Rich L. and his girlfriend, Brad, Chuck P. and his older brother, (the only time I ever met him, a creep, just like Chuck had described him to me years earlier) and some of Kim’s friends. The guests brought the booze and the pot and almost everyone partook of the Cool-Aid.
At one point as the band was setting up I walked into the crowded kitchen and I noticed Rich drinking the Cool-Aid from a large glass. I rushed to stop him but it was too late. He had already consumed at least three doses. He wasn’t good at reading instructions, just thirsty. But he was no light-weight when it came to drugs, especially hallucinogens, and enjoyed the party ripped, visibly stumbling and spilling his drinks. His girlfriend took care of him like a nurse and they stayed till the very end, around four a.m.
Everyone got pretty lit up and had a fine time. The music was great, different people taking turns playing. I even got Eddie to play some bass. He was a professional bass player, tall, of Chinese descent, handsome and very polite. He collected and ran his own band, making a living at it, playing cover tunes in cheap hotel lounges. A few years later he met his future wife, a pretty, pale-skinned red head made the lead vocalist, and with her beautiful voice their venues improved and careers prospered. But he never played informally so I had to drag him up front that night and hand him Bones’ base. He led the others in a new release, ‘My Sharona’ then skulked off to the front house, alone.
The others kept performing because they enjoyed it and loved to impress people, especially women. Partying and playing were one and the same. He considered playing as work. He seemed to have a dual personality, one, of typical, oriental reserve, politeness and order, the other breaking through at our poker games, swearing and laughing, drinking beers and smoking, but never to excess, as Jim and Roy did some nights, after fifteen beers to our five, falling off their chairs in fits of laughter. Back then he lived with Roy, perhaps the greatest sloven and most unambitious being I ever met. Even then I likened the two to Oscar and Felix of the ‘Odd Couple’.
A few years later he moved into a fine, new apartment with his wife. At least that’s what we heard from Roy. We never saw it or her. But he still came to our poker games, regularly, never missing one. So Bones and May and I dropped by one evening to surprise him at one of his shows at a Marriott Inn. He’d told us of this new singer and his rise in the world of ‘cover bands’, but we had to see it. We sat at a front table, ordered drinks, sat and clapped and he seemed distinctly embarrassed to introduce us briefly during a set break, as if he didn’t want his two worlds to intersect, though she was overjoyed to finally meet his best friends, shaking our hands, hugging May with a huge smile, as if she knew us intimately. He must have talked a great deal to her about us and the poker games. He kept coming back to them each week, (for years after this) and she must have encouraged it, his one, last tie to his old ways, and she, his wife and his road to a prosperous, mature future, was wise enough to let him keep this one wild night out, wiser than Pentheus in the ‘Bacchae’.
After everyone else left the party, I still remember Rich’s girlfriend yelling and pulling at him, trying to get him up. He sat in a chair by the front door, limp and barely able to open his eyes, too out of it to realize the party was over. Only Kim and I were left. The front door was open to clear out the smoke as we were cleaning up a few things and soon to crash, the music off and the house silent except for her voice, repeating that it was time to go, all to no purpose as he was in a daze.
After minutes of this I told her we had some sleeping bags and they could crash on the floor if they wanted. She declined and in a feat of Herculean strength, (little over half his weight) ripped him off the chair and with his one arm around her neck dragged him to his Mustang, flopped him in the bean-bag seat and sped away. She was the same girl I saw lying in bed in his house four years later, sadly altered, feeble and pale, unresponsive to us, (just as he’d been that night of the party), and as if she was unable to get out of bed. And she didn’t, the whole two hours Brad and I sat with Rich in the kitchen, drinking beers and discussing life, Rich with his usual gusto. All I could guess was that they’d recently met before that first scene. And now, after four years of trying to keep up with him in drink and cocaine, there she lay, speechless, in her underwear, her health gone, and Rich a paragon, a wonder of self-destructive abuse that rose with each new morning like the Phoenix, restored to health and eager to do it all over again.
Stamina.
I’ve said it about Phil in the dorms and with Rich before that. There are people you meet with traits, stamina, that you admire but learn never to emulate. The act of admiration implies taking a step back, differentiating yourself from that person, asking an autograph with bowed head then swiftly retreating. I suppose she was too close to his flame, unable to refuse each beer he handed her as he popped his next, and the many lines he laid out on the mirror, handing it to her after each one he snorted first. I could visit him on the occasional Friday night. But to imagine living with him day and night, for years, would be like a scene from Dante’s ‘Hell’.
Some women, out of love, feel compelled to try to match their boyfriends in their pleasures and pastimes, to make themselves true partners. In her case, I can’t conceive the other possibility, that she was an out-of-control drug addict bent on her own self-destruction. I can’t imagine her ever asking Rich for one more line or one more nail in the coffin, (whatever that might be) before he’d had it already spread out on the table and in her face. If someone meets the Devil you don’t blame them for their fall. In decadence he was a model enchanter, light years ahead of everyone else, a William S. Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson combined, only more handsome and hardly less fluent than either. But this was in his youth, when I knew him. He might not have survived past his twenties, as they did.
One piece of this puzzle, the progression of his life, I can see. When we were youths in high school I mentioned he never seemed interested in girls, just companions in drinking and drugs, party pals. Even when he visited me in the dorms, he came with my high school friends. But they went away to Junior colleges and he didn’t. After we were gone he tapped into the ‘second sex’ for nightly guests, because his one delight, in any intoxication, was talk and company. Without them it was ghastly. He needed the validation of others getting stoned beside him and their pleasant chatter. He was a social being, never knowing books. He had money, looks and charm, a convertible Mustang, a nice pad, a motorboat on the delta, flat-bottomed, with a cabin that could accommodate four, and his half-hidden addictions to booze and drugs, almost any woman’s downfall.
